Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Here's the text of a presentation I just did for a student group at UC Davis. The Powerpoint slides are linked here.

Preliminaries:
• You shouldn’t be here.
• What I’m going to say is just going to ruin everything.
• You should be in church.
• Seriously, some of you really should go to church instead.
• Ok, I warned you.

What you believe:
 The chances are very good that you consider yourself to be a Christian.
 If you are a Christian, then you believe that Jesus was a real person.
 So you probably also believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
 That is, Jesus was a supernatural being of some sort and the most important event concerning him was his execution then his magical revival from the dead.
 But believing that Jesus was resurrected is irrational for you.

Believing in Jesus’ Resurrection is Irrational for You:
 The body of evidence is small, weak, and riddled with unanswered questions.
 There are other alleged supernatural events about which you have far more substantial evidence, yet you reject those beliefs on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence.
 So by rejecting those better supported claims and accepting the magical claims about Jesus, you are employing a grossly inconsistent epistemic standard.
 You engage in an ad hoc lowering of the bar about Jesus, yet in other comparable cases you sustain a higher level of proof that would lead you reject Jesus.
 My goal: to get you to acknowledge that your continued believing in the resurrection of Jesus is unreasonable and inconsistent with your epistemic policies.
 What’s the evidence we have concerning the resurrection?

The Gospels: some history
 Jesus is thought to have been executed about 35 A.D.
 The first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are our only source of information about the events.
 Mark was written around 65 A.D.
 Matthew was written between 70-100 A.D. and Luke was written around 70 A.D. The agreement is that they were based largely on Mark and another source, now lost, called the Q source.
 John was written around 90-100 A.D.
 None of these works were written by eyewitnesses, and none of them were written by the disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
 The authors of the books heard the stories from others. We do not know how many people the stories passed through from the events to their being recorded. It could have been 2, 20, or 200.

Problem #1: The Paucity of Evidence
 So if we are being careful about what we know and what we don’t, this is what we have:
 3 hearsay sources (Mark, Q, and John) written 30-90 years after the fact with an unknown number of transmissions before.
 This picture is brief and rough; the discussion of the details is vast.

#2: The 3 Stories are Surprisingly Contradictory:
 Luke: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary (James’ mother) and other women go to the tomb, find it open, talk to two men in shining garments, and then go tell what they saw to the other disciples.
 Mark: Mary Magdalene, Mary (James’ mother), and Salome go to the tomb, find it open, and find one man sitting there in white inside. They talk to him, then they run away in fear and they do not say “any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”
 Matthew: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb. A great earthquake opens it by rolling the stone away. They go inside and find an angel of the Lord in white. Then they leave with fear and joy and run to bring the disciples word.
 John: Mary Magdalene (by herself) finds the tomb open. She goes and gets Simon Peter and the other disciple “that Jesus loved.” The two of them go to the tomb and find it empty. They leave, but Mary stays crying. Then two angels appear to her. Then Jesus himself appears to her. She talks to him and then goes to tell the rest of the disciples.

#3: Probability, Reliability and Transmission:
 Suppose the police must escort $10,000 in drug money across the country from New York to Los Angeles.
 The money will be in police custody for the whole trip, but it will change hands between three different cops for different legs of the journey.
 There is corruption in their police departments so that the general likelihood that a given cop is honest is .8.
 If a corrupt cop gets custody of the drug money, he or she will take some.
 If an honest cop gets custody, he or she will deliver it to the next leg of the trip without taking any of it.

Question: What are the odds of all the money arriving in Los Angeles?
 Answer: .51. (.8 x .8 x .8)
 If you add two more cops at the .8 honesty rate it goes down to .32 (And that’s despite the fact that majority of cops in each department are honest.)
 That is, even if the links in the transmission chain are individually probably reliable, the cumulative effect quickly undermines the result.
 The cops here represent the people who transmitted the Jesus story from the alleged eyewitnesses to the authors of the Gospels.

How Reliable are Eyewitnesses to Miracles?
 What about the original reports of Jesus’ resurrection? (Do we have $10,000?)
 Can we determine the reliability of eyewitness miracle testimony?
 We can.
 Lourdes, France: 80,000 pilgrims a year for over a century= more than 8 million people.
 Suppose, charitably, that half experienced something they took to be supernatural.
 66 miracles have been declared to be real by the official investigating body of the Catholic church.
 Miracle testimony reliability= 66/4,000,000 or .0000165
 (A probability needs to be greater than .5 to be reasonable.)

Odds on the Jesus Story?
 Now we can improve our account:
 .0000165 x .8 x .8 x .8= .000008
 That’s about 8 in 1 million.
 If we reduce the number of “real” miracles at Lourdes, as we should, to a still generous 5, and lower the reliability of the transmitters or add a few more links, then the result is
 .000000021 or about 1 in 5 million.
 The point: our confidence in the Jesus story is orders of magnitude smaller than it needs to be for us to take it seriously. Given what we know about the original reporting and the transmission of these stories it is exceedingly unlikely that they are true.

It Gets Worse
 Question: Would the early followers of Jesus have been more or less reliable about reporting miraculous events than the people at Lourdes?
 Answer: Much less reliable.

#4: You reject supernatural claims with more evidence:
 We have even more reasons to doubt the reliability of the original believers because of who they were and when they lived.
 Several important differences between them and us undermine their reliability even more:

Supernatural Belief Threshold
 How disposed is a person, in general, to accept or reject claims about supernatural entities, forces, or events?
 Low SBT = they are more readily disposed to believe that supernatural claims are true. Their error rate with regard to supernatural claims would be high: they would conclude that miracles were more common than they really are, for example.
 If there were supernatural ideas circulating about that were false or unfounded, this person would be more likely to believe them and repeat them.
 The person with a low SBT would mislead you in the direction of accepting more of those claims than are true and well-supported.

Ignorance
 If someone is largely ignorant of the important background information concerning a topic, then their lack of information reduces their reliability.
 So my ignorance about it should diminish the confidence you have about one of those claims being true, all other things being equal.
 That’s why you shouldn’t believe me when I insist that the Detroit Lions will win the Superbowl.
 And that’s why you shouldn’t get your political views from Lindsay Lohan.

Religiousness and supernaturalism are inversely related to education:
 We have good empirical evidence that as a person’s education level increases, their belief in survival of the soul, miracles, heaven, the resurrection, the virgin birth, hell, the devil, ghosts, astrology, and reincarnation drop off dramatically. (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359)
 Gallup Polls have consistently found similar results. (http://www.gallup.com/poll/109108/Belief-God-Far-Lower-Western-US.aspx)
 Religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism are positively correlated with ignorance. When people have more education, they are less likely to believe.

We can make the same sort of projection back across time:
 Consider the difference between your education level, or the general level of knowledge that the average American with a K-12 education has and the level of ignorance of a simple fisherman or a beggar living in the first century in Palestine.
 Almost all of the information that you take for granted, the technology, and the methods for acquiring information were unavailable to them.
 A tiny fraction of the population would have been literate.
 Their mathematical abilities would have been worse than today’s average 3rd grader.
 They did not know that the Earth moves, or what the Sun was.
 They did not know what electricity, hydrogen are.
 They did not know what caused disease, or pregnancy, or death.
 If religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism rise as education goes down, then they must have been rampant among the people who had contact with Jesus (if he was real at all.)

Were they skeptical?
 How much skepticism, doubtfulness, or disposition towards critical scrutiny does a person have?
 If a person habitually reflects on the evidence carefully, makes a conscious and careful effort to gather the broadest body of relevant evidence, and actively seeks out disconfirming grounds for a claim, that, all other things being equal, is favorable with regard to their trustworthiness as a source of information.
 If a person whose skepticism is high becomes satisfied that X is true, then you could be more confident that it is true, all other things being equal, than you would be if your source for the same claim was someone who is generally gullible, uncritical, and who does not reflect or seek out disconfirming evidence.

The Point
 The early believers would have had a low Supernatural Belief Threshold, a high level of Ignorance, and a low level of Skepticism.
 SBT: For Iron Age people 2,000 years ago, the world would have been full of mysterious forces, magical events, spiritual entities, stories about supernatural happenings. Hundreds of the events that you observe every day and know the causes of would have been complete mysteries to them. For all they knew, headaches were caused by magic. The possibility that someone could come back from the dead would have seemed like common sense to them. (Bereavement hallucinations)
 Ignorance: They were ignorant of the information that we have concerning religious tendencies, religious group dynamics, psychology, alternative explanations for paranormal beliefs.
 They were ignorant of the 2,000 years of examples of allegedly supernatural events that turned out to be easily explainable in natural terms.
 In that 2,000 years, we have learned a staggering amount about how human psychology works, errors in reasoning, problems in eye-witness reports, gullibility, mistakes, social-religious phenomena, and so on.
 Skepticism: They would have been much less skeptical overall than many people who are good sources of information now are.
 They would not have been trained or practiced or even familiar with the notions of disconfirming evidence, alternative explanations, bias, and justification.
 They were deeply committed religious converts.

#5: You already reject supernatural claims with more evidence
 The early Christian stories are often defended as reliable on the grounds that:
 there were multiple eyewitness accounts,
 the story would have been too difficult to fake given the public nature of Jesus’ execution,
 the witnesses would not have had any ulterior motives about reporting something that would get them persecuted,
 the followers were so convinced that they gave up their jobs and their possessions,
 many of the events of the New Testament have been historically corroborated: the reign of Herod, the destruction of the temple, the growth of the early church.
 and so on

The Salem Witch Trials
 Between 1692 and 1693, dozens of people were accused, arrested, stood trial, and were tortured or hanged for “Sundry acts of Witchcraft,” possession by devils, and other supernatural ill deeds.
 Strange behavior in some little girls fed suspicions. They would dash about, freeze in grotesque postures, complain about biting and pinching sensations, and have violent seizures.
 Ultimately over 150 people were accused.
 William Phips, the governor of Massachusetts got involved. A court was established.
 Thorough investigations were conducted. Witnesses were carefully cross-examined.
 Evidence was gathered. Many people confessed.
 The entire proceedings were carefully documented with thousands of sworn affidavits, court documents, interviews, and related papers.
 In the end, 19 people, including Sarah Goode, and Rebekah Nurse had been sentenced and executed.
 Today, the Salem Witch Trials are a frightening example of how enthusiasm, hysteria, social pressure, anxiety, and religious fervor can be powerful enough to lead ordinary people to do such extraordinary and mistaken things. “Witch hunt” has come to be synonymous with an irrational and emotionally heated persecution.

What evidence do we have that the women in Salem were really witches?
 First, hundreds of people were involved in concluding that the accused were witches.
 They testified in court, signed sworn affidavits, and demonstrated their utter conviction that the accused were witches.
 Furthermore, they came from diverse backgrounds and social strata.
 They included magistrates, judges, the governor of Massachusetts, respected members of the community, husbands of the accused, and so on.
 These people had a great deal to lose by being correct—men would lose their wives, children would lose their mothers, community members would lose friends they cared about. It seems very unlikely that they could have had ulterior motives.
 The trials were thorough, careful, exhaustive investigations. They deliberately gathered evidence, and made a substantial attempt to objectively sort out truth from falsity. In the court trials, they attempted to carefully discern the facts.
 That there were witch trials in Salem and that many people were put to death has been thoroughly corroborated with a range of historical sources.

We have a great deal of historical evidence about Salem
 The trials were a mere 300 years ago, not 2,000.
 We have the actual documents; we do not have any of the original Gospels, only copies from centuries later.
 We have the actual, sworn testimony of people claiming to have seen the magic performed; the Gospel stories are retellings of stories that were passed by word of mouth through an unknown number of people.
 For the Salem witch trials, we have enough evidence to fill a truck. Some of the original documents: http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/texts/transcripts.html

Evidence for Magic in Salem >> than Evidence for Magic in Jerusalem
 By any reasonable measure of quantity and quality, the evidence we have for concluding that there were real witches in Salem is vastly better than the evidence we have for concluding that Jesus was magical.
 Yet it is simply not reasonable to believe that the women in Salem really were witches or really performed magic.
 It is obvious to any reasonable person that even though they were tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft, they were not witches and they did not perform any magical acts. You don’t think they were witches.
 Nor do I need to defend any particular alternative explanation, such as the rotten rye grain/hallucination theory, in order to reasonably conclude that they weren’t witches. I can be sure that they weren’t witches even if I don’t know all of what really happened.
 The Salem Witch Trials show that it is possible to meet an even heavier burden of proof than what we have for the resurrection of Jesus, and it remains unreasonable to believe that anything magical happened.
 No clear headed person should accept the claim that the historical evidence makes it reasonable to believe that Jesus came back from the dead.

Conclusion: Believing in Jesus’ Resurrection is Irrational for You
 The evidence you have smaller, weaker, and too riddled with unanswered questions.
 We have good reasons to think that the people who originally told the stories were not reliable. 1/ 5 million.
 If you think it is reasonable to believe that Jesus came back from the dead, you’re employing a grossly inconsistent double standard: There are many other alleged supernatural events that you have better evidence for, yet you adopt a high level of skepticism and proof and reject them. (Salem Witch Trials)
 It is unreasonable to engage in an ad hoc lowering of the bar about Jesus, and accept a tiny, tenuous group of hearsay stories from a group of Iron Age religious converts about outrageous magical events.

The Problems:
 Problem 1: Only three hearsay sources.
 Problem 2: The stories about the resurrection are contradictory.
 Problem 3: The probability of a claim equals the factorial of the reliability of all points of its transmission
 Problem 4: The early believers would have been highly receptive to supernatural claims, their ignorance of relevant alternative explanations would have been high, and they would have had a low level of skepticism.
 Religiousness and supernaturalism are inversely related to education.
 We can make the same sort of projection back across time.
 Problem 5: Your evidence for magic in Salem (and other supernatural events) is better than your evidence for magic in Jerusalem. (Reject them both!)
 Amen.

36 comments:

ungullible
said...

Hi Matt! This is a nice summary of several good points against Christianity. However, I think it is missing one key subject that Christians almost always respond with when their logical arguments fail them.... faith. A slide or three on why the extreme form of faith employed by religion (maintenance of faith in the face of contradictory or completely lacking evidence) is wrong, unhealthy, etc would have made the presentation more complete.

However, I doubt it would have mattered. The more extreme the lack of justification for their faith, the more they seem to hold it with pride. It's like one of those sci-fi movies where the monster feeds on negative energy. The more you shoot it, the stronger it gets.

I have one quibble. You ask "So for the visitors at Lourdes, what is their reliability for reporting miraculous events?", and then calculate on the basis of 4 million reports. But clearly there are not 4 million reports in existence. Your 4 million is a guess at how many believed they had seen a miracle, which is different. It's also possible that the Church's criteria for a miracle are too strict - they don't want to be laughed at, after all.

The talk went well, RS. Thanks for asking. I didn't hear any comments that I thought were serious challenges to the basic points here.

They did bring up faith, predictably. As they always do.

But here's a mistake that non-believers often make that I'm not going to. When someone invokes faith as a justification for their belief, they are, I take it, stating that they are going to believe despite the fact that the evidence overall weighs against believing, or that the evidential situation is ambiguous, as they see it, about believing. We have heard this so many times and so many people say it that I think non-believers feel like there's really a point here that needs to be addressed. But if someone invokes faith as their answer, I see that as an open admission of their being patently irrational. They''ve just conceded that yes the argument you're giving is devastating to the reasonableness of belief, but I don't care, I'm going to believe anyway. I don't know what answer I could give to that, other than to point out that they've just disengaged from rational, intellectually honest discussion about something of vast importance. I've commented here in a number of places about the dangers of thumbing your nose at what's true and reasonable like this. But people persist, and we seem to be so used to hearing it that we think they've got a point.

Consider what the faith response amounts to in this context. I have argued with sound empirical research and substantial evidence that we should assign an astronomically low probability to the truth of the reports about Jesus resurrection. The resurrection is the single most important, foundational claim for the whole edifice of Christianity. So if this argument is right (it is), then the entire Christian religion is based on a mistake. In response, they say, "Well, I'm going to believe anyway because I don't care about the facts or being reasonable."

Those of us who don't believe should be completely intolerant of this sort of response. Everyone has a moral, social, and epistemological responsibility to hold up their side of the social contract here. If I have to live with you, vote with you, be subject to your laws, put my kids in your classrooms, or generally share citizenship with you, you don't get to just check out on something so important, believe what you want, and ignore science, the facts, and the evidence. "I have faith" = "I am irrational and dangerous."

As long as you insist upon rationality in the believer you will continue to beat your head against that wall. Irrationality is precisely the point, as I alluded to before; and precisely because they believe its okay to be irrational in this one isolated area. It is what I take it to mean when said that the non-fundamentalist believer has compartmentalized his mind. He can be the most rational person in the world in every other aspect of life -he can be the head of the Human Genome project- and yet still feel the need to be irrational in this one, unique, compartmentalized area of his mind. Why such people feel no cognitive dissonance, I have no idea.

"Those of us who don't believe should be completely intolerant to this sort of response" (with regard to believer invoking faith as basis for belief).

I'm asking this doubt absolutely in the earnest, what can the nonbelievers really do? In what form do you propose to allow "intolerance" to become manifest?

One can maybe consider faith as inadmissible basis for belief in academic debates, but what about day-to-day life? As ungullible pointed out, and so did I in my comment on one of your posts, the more you prove theists to be wrong, firmer their belief seems to become.

On the whole, nice summary! Can be used as a "template" to prove all the religious scriptures wrong ;) Congratulations!

"Officially atheistic governments murdered over 100 Million people in the 20th century alone."

No totalitarian governments killed those people for political ends. Because they were TOTALITARIAN.

Atheism is not a political philosophy dontcha know.

The communist government power structure was overlaid on top of a totalitarian christian culture, they were more like a religion than not. With a rigid hierarchy and a cult of personality much like the orthodox christian religion it replaced.

I can't believe you actually brought that tired old canard up in this discussion, sheesh stay on topic will ya.

Anon. where did you get that number. Christian lead governments still have those bet. I wouldn't be surprised if you could say 1,000,000,000 have died due to christian government actions and still be short. Of course it is all how you define what a christiain government is, just as you are defining those governments. I could use some numbers from different groups and say that the christian government of the USA killed over a million Iraq people. Am I right in this?

Officially atheistic governments murdered over 100 Million people in the 20th century alone.The human population of Earth has grown greatly since science and medicine have been increasing the human lifespan. Therefore I suggest that it might be useful to look at the percentage of the population killed rather than raw numbers. Using this measure, Cain was a great criminal for having killed 1/4 of humanity. But that pales in comparison to Yahweh, who killed the entire human population of the planet except for eight or so people; Noah, his wife, their kids and the kids' spouses. So it really doesn't work in the Christian's favor to paint mass murder as a bad thing.

I would like to add to your commentary and train of thought; with the consideration of the witch hunts, timeline, comparable ignorance, etc. Can I "invert" your line of reasoning? That is, what if the commentators of antiquity had our current understanding with respect to the sciences, history, myths, etc. I would like to think there were some honest men among them. Which means that at least some of them would have had the scruples to conclude that the Jesus myth was just unsubstatiated rumor.Which brings me to my point, our current exemplars of religiosity are, in the course of legitimate debate, basically stomping their feet and in the most adolesent vitriol proclaiming that they refuse to eat their peas - priceless! And I am (with this rhetorical device) graphically portraying how this "argument" should be received in any logical debate. Besides the best evidence I know for a lack of faith is the Pope Mobile and lightning rods on churches -- go figure.

Interesting ideas, BeachBum. I'm not sure exactly where you're going with it. There probably were some doubters in Jesus' time about the stories they were hearing. But since the fox has been watching the henhouse for all of these centuries, I seriously doubt that even if any of these doubters had tried to write down their concerns they would have made it through the centuries to us. The almost sole guardians of the texts upon which modern Christian belief is based are also the people who have the greatest vested interest in seeing modern Christian belief spread. So they would have never let us see any serious challenges to the orthodoxy. I'm surprised, actually, that we still have non-cannonical works like the Gospel of Peter and the Gnostic Gospels at all.

However, there are lots of people who practice religion, even the Christian religion, who would simply accept my argument and acknowledge the sketchiness of believing in a real, literal resurrection. They find my literalness and fundamentalism, as it were, odd and off the point. Being religious for them probably isn't about believing that the resurrection claims are true. It's something else. I can't see, however, why they would engage in all this play acting and going along if they don't really believe. I mean, what the hell are you doing singing, praying, going to church, doing rituals, teaching your kids Bible stories, and so on if you don't really believe all that stuff. So as I see it, you're crazy if you don't believe it but act like you do, and if you do believe it, then you're being starkly irrational.

The points regarding Lourdes France are good and could be expanded to include the Black Stone of Mecca. The issue of faith can be shown to be fallacious when we learn that you are more likely to be trampled to death in the hordes that visit Mecca than you are to be helped or healed. In 2004, for example, 244 people were trampled to death on the Hajj for throwing stones at stone pillars resembling the Devil. Was the Devil stronger and therefore able to retaliate? Was he Devil mocking a weaker god? Or, is it more likely that large groups of people in a confined space creates an atmosphere of chaos?

Ah yes, the reply will be that it is “God’s will” and that we cannot understand his divine plan. I’ll leave that for another commenter.

"Anonymous said...If your right and we return to nothing what difference does all this make? You win!"

Are you so small minded to think that without some creator that nothing matters. I find meaning and purpose without belief in some god because I know that there is always the chance my actions will make life better for someone else. Yeah someotimes mistakes are made and harm is done but many christians do the same things even with their beliefs. I don't see that believing in a god makes anyone better but in many cases it makes them worse.

Matt, thats exactly what your trying to do. Don't care, because my arguments wouldn't matter on this site. You win! Baconsbud, you should try to recognize sarcasim when you see it. God bless us all. Tiny Tim

Matt, after reading your very fine article proving that christians are nothing more than inferior dimwits. I have no choice other than to except that your superior unsinkable arguments are of course completly correct. You see going against what you have said here is like peeing up wind and expecting nothing back. So, You win! One thing I'd like to see is if you would exspend as much energy talking about Islam and their Moon God Allah. Of course being dimwitted I would just have to hope. God bless us everyone. Tiny Tim

Thanks for reading the posts, anonymous. Your tone suggests that you're angry, so I have a question: why is it that my skepticism about Jesus' resurrection has made you so upset? Wouldn't it be better if people could reflect on the issue without so much personal anxiety?

And on the topic of Islam: If you're suggesting that similar concerns undermine the historical reliability of Islam, you're absolutely right. Many of the same sorts of doubts apply. The history of the Koran is different, however, so the details differ. But in general, we should be highly skeptical about the truth of supernatural claims coming from ancient religions because of the level of education of the people making them, the unreliability of transmission across the centuries, and alterations of the texts by people with vested interests. That's one of the reasons why it's a mistake to be a Muslim too. For the moment, I'm just concentrating on Christianity in my book.

Matt, Im not angry. It's just that you have made your arguement that anyone who believes in what the bible proclaims can't be very educated. My purpose is to point out that when you start by downgrading some one. Anything said after that is of no value. From the side of the ones you say are unknowing. By the way I have a PhD in Biblical studies [new testimant]. No anger, it's just that if you truly want all sides you have to consider not telling people from the beginning that their beliefs are not important as far as your concerned. Thats why I keep telling you, that you win. I won't comment here anymore just wanted you to know what your projecting.

You're not reading very closely, anonymous. My claim is very specific: the first followers of Jesus were not educated, mostly illiterate, and they would have had an Iron Age world view that was heavily populated with mysterious supernatural forces, spiritual events, and magical happenings. This isn't a controversial claim, it's just history. And this "uneducated" worldview would have significantly affected the sorts of things they would have believed about their religious figures. In considering what they said was true, we have to consider the source. You wouldn't have accepted medical advice from them for the same reason: they simply would have had no clue about the existence of heart disease or dietary factors that cause it. Likewise, they would have thought a lot more events in the world were magical, mysterious, or supernatural in origin than is accurate. If you've got a Ph.D. in Bible history, then you'll know that more than anyone.

What does that imply about the modern believer? There are lots of educated believers now, but my argument is that they should not believe on the basis of the early followers beliefs.

Do you have any constructive criticisms to make of the argument, or just irrelevant comments about me and my method? Give us some plausible reasons to think that when a superstitious, illiterate Iron Age peasant who is a religious zealot thinks he saw a magical event, WE should believe him?

Sure I can always tell when something is sarcastic by the body language as you type. Oh that's right I can't see though the screen while you are typing. If you read enough of these blogs you see this type of comment not as sarcasm but as actually views people have. Most people meaning for something to be sarcastic either end the comment with lol or sarcasm.

My book is out:

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.